From ancient times to the present, we have seen too many officials, and they all have a more criticized feature of the world, that is, when anyone is in a high position, they will choose to use corruption to make their family wealth become solid and make their power more powerful.
And this kind of greed for power and money, often the end result is not good. From China's feudal dynasty to today, corrupt officials have always been the object of our hatred, and the extent to which these people are corrupt is definitely not just what some of our current film and television dramas depict. Through some historical data, we can find that in some powerful times, corrupt officials often embezzle more money than we think, such as the person we are going to introduce today.
This person's name is Yuan Zai, and he is not actually a person from a particularly well-off family, but a grassroots person who has come from a very poor family. A grassroots can crawl through the imperial court, which shows how much effort he needs to put in. However, after a person has worked hard and achieved great achievements, he often does not cherish the fruits of his own labor, but because of his growing power, he begins to make some gray transactions, which include some things such as buying and selling official positions and corruption and bribery. Yuan Zai itself was only a grassroots, and later with the constant attachment of others in the imperial court, he won the recommendation of many people, and finally achieved the position of prime minister in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, such a position above ten thousand people under one person. However, what people did not expect was that the position where he finally capsized the ship was planted on a seasoning.
This seasoning also appears often in our daily life now, and this seasoning is pepper. I believe that everyone can not imagine that a prime minister will actually overturn on the pepper! In fact, things are not as simple as we think, because during the Tang Dynasty, because the entire national strength was very strong, and there was a lot of exchanges and trade with the outside world, some foreign emissaries often brought some local specialties to the Tang Dynasty to offer. In the process, one country is the Tianzhu Kingdom, which will bring some spices from Southeast Asia. One of these spices is pepper, which was not the existence of such a condiment for our cash during the Tang Dynasty, it had certain medicinal value as a spice, and people at that time regarded it as a special medicinal material.
Now we want to buy a foreign product, we all know that the purchase fee of this product is very expensive, because due to the tariff problem at home and abroad, the transportation of these things in the country has become a very difficult thing, and this situation was more obvious during the Tang Dynasty. Because the Tianzhu Kingdom at that time did not fully value the Asian market, it sold most of its sales to Europe, and in the process of changing hands, some Asians also looked at this spice, so they bought this spice at a high price. And this spice itself because of the high price when purchased, coupled with the cost of transportation, the whole has become a very scarce medicinal resource, so it has become a kind of existence for the royal family.
Originally, a spice could not become the root of a courtier's conviction, but what people did not expect was that a current prime minister had more spices than the emperor. The spices he used at that time could probably reach about 800 stones from his home, and this 800 stones converted to 64 tons today. In those days, a handful of pepper was equivalent to the economic benefits of robbing a bank today, let alone 800 stones! Many people are also very curious about this spice, why did this 800 stone lead to the final emperor sentence Yuan Zai to death?
In fact, the main reason is that these 800 stones on the one hand reflect the strong ability of this courtier to embezzle, and on the other hand, they also reflect the jealousy in the emperor's heart. Because the special spices provided by the imperial family are not very many, 800 stones can be found in his home, but the emperor is so rich that he does not have it, so he also feels that his face is very hanging, so he is very angry. This 800 stones of pepper is equivalent to more than 10 billion yuan today. It can be seen that in that poor era, this was a big blow to the emperor. During the Tang Dynasty, the money embezzled by corrupt officials was truly jaw-dropping.